Monday, February 13, 2017

Don’t worry; humans will still be useful for work for at least 10-15 more years

MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson on AI:

... he pushes back a little on high-profile tech executives such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who in recent years have voiced concerns about the potential negative consequences of advances in A.I.

“I disagree with Elon and Bill bringing it up too aggressively,” he said. “It can be counterproductive to overestimate what machines can do right now. There’s no shortage of work that can be done [only by humans] in the next 10 to 15 years.”...

But it will require massive changes in how society operates. For one, Brynjolfsson thinks it could be essential for governments to institute universal basic income or related programs so that people can sustain themselves.

This is a common thread among technologists today. It's becoming rather blatantly obvious that rapidly accelerating progress in AI and automation will be making people in general unemployable in one or two generations. The solution is for everyone to get a "creative" job (laughable) -- and, obviously, we'll need to institute a basic universal income.

DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S HAPPENING POLITICALLY TODAY? There is no chance of instituting basic universal income in the U.S. Possibly by the end of next week there'll be no health insurance, no Medicaire, no Medicaid, no EPA, no CDC, etc.

In the case of Brynjolfsson, the supposedly comforting thought is that it will "only" take 30 or 50 years before humans are entirely unemployable (first paragraph of article). Xconomy